Electrical and Computer Engineering PublicationsCopyright (c) 2014 Western University All rights reserved.http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/electricalpub
Recent documents in Electrical and Computer Engineering Publicationsen-usFri, 19 Dec 2014 16:33:28 PST3600uOS : A resource rerouting middleware for ubiquitous gameshttp://ir.lib.uwo.ca/electricalpub/57
http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/electricalpub/57Mon, 12 May 2014 06:31:12 PDT
Ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) relies on the computation distributed over the environment to simplify the tasks performed by its users. A smart space is an instance of a ubiquitous environment, composed of a dynamic and heterogeneous set of devices that interact to support the execution of distributed smart applications. In this context, mobile devices provide new resources when they join the environment, which disappear when they leave it. This introduces the challenge of self-adaptation, in which smart applications may either include new resources as they become available or replace them when they become unavailable. Ubiquitous games combine ubicomp and computer game technologies to enrich user’s experience and fun. Such games may benefit from different input and output resources offered by mobile devices. To support the development and deployment of ubiquitous games, this work presents the uOS middleware. Using a DSOA (Device Service Oriented Architecture) based architecture and lightweight service discovery protocols, uOS ensures compatibility among resources, providing resource rerouting between heterogeneous and limited software and hardware platforms. The uMoleHunt game is presented to illustrate the practical application of uOS.
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Fabricio N. Buzeto et al.Contextual Anomaly Detection in Big Sensor Datahttp://ir.lib.uwo.ca/electricalpub/56
http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/electricalpub/56Fri, 09 May 2014 13:56:22 PDT
Performing predictive modelling, such as anomaly detection, in Big Data is a difficult task. This problem is compounded as more and more sources of Big Data are generated from environmental sensors, logging applications, and the Internet of Things. Further, most current techniques for anomaly detection only consider the content of the data source, i.e. the data itself, without concern for the context of the data. As data becomes more complex it is increasingly important to bias anomaly detection techniques for the context, whether it is spatial, temporal, or semantic. The work proposed in this paper outlines a contextual anomaly detection technique for use in streaming sensor networks. The technique uses a well-defined content anomaly detection algorithm for real-time point anomaly detection. Additionally, we present a post-processing context aware anomaly detection algorithm based on sensor profiles, which are groups of contextually similar sensors generated by a multivariate clustering algorithm. Our proposed research has been implemented and evaluated with real-world data provided by Powersmiths, located in Brampton, Ontario, Canada.
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Michael Hayes et al.Improvement of Open Source Software Usability: An Empirical Evaluation from Developers Perspectivehttp://ir.lib.uwo.ca/electricalpub/55
http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/electricalpub/55Wed, 07 May 2014 07:10:48 PDT
User satisfaction has always been important for software success whether it is Open Source Software (OSS) or closed proprietary software. Even though we do not presume that OSS always has poor usability, as there are examples of good usable open source software, it would still be agreed that OSS usability has room for further improvement. This paper presents an empirical investigation to study the impact of some key factors on OSS usability from developers’ points of view. This is one of the series of four studies that we are conducting regarding improvement of OSS usability from OSS developers, users, contributors, and industry perspectives. The research model of this empirical investigation studies and establishes the relationship between the key usability factors from developers’ perspective and OSS usability. A data set of 106 OSS developers from 18 open source projects of varied size has been used to study the research model. The results of this study provide empirical evidence that the studied key factors play a significant role in improving OSS usability.
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Arif Raza et al.Institutionalization of Software Product Line: An Empirical Investigation of Key Organizational Factorshttp://ir.lib.uwo.ca/electricalpub/54
http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/electricalpub/54Wed, 07 May 2014 06:10:55 PDT
A good fit between the person and the organization is essential in a better organizational performance. This is even more crucial in case of institutionalization of a software product line practice within an organization. Employees’ participation, organizational behavior and management contemplation play a vital role in successfully institutionalizing software product lines in a firm. Organizational dimension has been weighted as one of the critical dimensions in software product line theory and practice. A comprehensive empirical investigation to study the impact of some organizational factors on the performance of software product line practice is presented in this work. This is the first study to empirically investigate and demonstrate the relationships between some of the key organizational factors and software product line performance of an organization. The results of this investigation provide empirical evidence and further support the theoretical foundations that in order to institutionalize software product lines within an organization, organizational factors play an important role.
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Faheem Ahmed et al.Bringing the Human Factor to Software Engineeringhttp://ir.lib.uwo.ca/electricalpub/53
http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/electricalpub/53Tue, 06 May 2014 11:50:00 PDT
The human aspects involved in the software development process are vital to a successful completion of a software project. The author advocates for human factor topics to be part of mainstream software engineering education in order to elevate job satisfaction, improve performance, and increase productivity of software engineers. Emphasis should be on providing a practical overview of software engineering processes from a human perspective, offering alternative viewpoints within technically saturated curricula.
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Luiz Fernando CapretzC# Traceability Systemhttp://ir.lib.uwo.ca/electricalpub/52
http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/electricalpub/52Fri, 02 May 2014 13:11:09 PDT
Traceability information is a valuable asset that software development teams can leverage to minimise their risk during production and maintenance of software projects. When maintainers are added to a software project post-production, they have to learn the system from scratch and understand its dynamics before they can begin making appropriate modifications to the source code. The system outlined in this paper extracts traceability information directly from the source code of C# projects, and presents it in such a way that it can be easily used to understand the logic and validate changes to the system.
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Luiz Fernando Capretz et al.ODEP-DPS: Ontology-Driven Engineering Process for the Collaborative Development of Semantic Data Providing Serviceshttp://ir.lib.uwo.ca/electricalpub/51
http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/electricalpub/51Fri, 02 May 2014 13:11:07 PDT

Context

Data services are services that handle operations involving the management of data. A problem with data services is that their interfaces are defined by their syntax alone. Consequently, Data Providing Services (DPSs) have been proposed to explicitly define semantics using ontologies for services that only retrieve data. However, the semantic annotations of DPSs are developed as afterthoughts to deployed data services.

Objective

The objective of this work is to present a DPS development process that considers all of a DPS’s dimensions including its data acquisition logic, syntax and semantics thus addressing the issue of semantic annotations developed as afterthoughts. This shall decrease the cost of deploying and maintaining DPSs.

Method

This paper contributes a holistic and collaborative process – ODEP-DPS – for the development of DPSs. It is holistic as it considers both semantics and syntax from requirements to implementation. And it is collaborative as it separates responsibilities between the roles of those who require the data and those who own them. The process is to be ontology-driven as an ontological model shall be utilized through each phase of the process; it shall formalize the requirements domain, be used as a basis for the syntactic data model, and serve as the domain ontology for annotating the deployed DPSs.

Results

This paper proposes the ODEP-DPS development process, in addition to defining three artefacts used throughout the process. In particular, a message descriptor is defined that binds semantics and syntax into a single reusable unit. A comprehensive definition of a DPS is also provided. ODEP-DPS is evaluated using a real-life case study from a mental health institution.

Conclusion

This study contributes a holistic and collaborative development process that provides an end-to-end solution for the development of semantic data providing services. It addresses semantics being developed as afterthoughts by tightly coupling semantics and syntax.

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Kevin Brown et al.A Privacy Service for Comparison of Privacy and Trust Policies within SOAhttp://ir.lib.uwo.ca/electricalpub/50
http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/electricalpub/50Fri, 02 May 2014 13:11:04 PDT
Privacy for Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is required to gain the trust of those who would use the technology. Through the use of an independent Privacy Service (PS), the privacy policies of a service consumer and provider can be compared to create an agreed upon privacy contract. In this paper we further define a metamodel for privacy policy creation and comparison. A trust element is developed as an additional criterion for a privacy policy. We define the PS, outline what operations it must perform to accomplish its goals and present how the PS operates in different scenarios. We believe the PS combined with the enhanced metamodel provide a strong solution for providing privacy in an SOA environment.
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David S. Allison et al.Service Evolution Patternshttp://ir.lib.uwo.ca/electricalpub/49
http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/electricalpub/49Fri, 02 May 2014 12:46:06 PDT
Service evolution is the process of maintaining and evolving existing Web services to cater for new requirements and technological changes. In this paper, a service evolution model is proposed to analyze service dependencies, identify changes on services and estimate impact on consumers that will use new versions of these services. Based on the proposed service evolution model, four service evolution patterns are described: compatibility, transition, split-map, and merge-map. These proposed patterns provide reusable templates to encourage well-defined service evolution while minimizing issues that arise otherwise. They can be applied in the service evolution scenario where a single service is used by many, possibly unknown, consumers’ applications. In such a scenario, providers evolve their services independently from consumers, which might cause unexpected errors and incur unpredicted impact on the dependent consumers' applications. Therefore, providers can use these patterns to estimate the impact that changes to be introduced to their services may cause on their consumers, and to allow consumers smoothly migrate to the newest version of the service.
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Shuying Wang et al.Evaluation of Particle Swarm Optimization Applied to Grid Schedulinghttp://ir.lib.uwo.ca/electricalpub/48
http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/electricalpub/48Fri, 02 May 2014 12:46:04 PDT
The problem of scheduling independent users’ jobs to resources in Grid Computing systems is of paramount importance. This problem is known to be NP-hard, and many techniques have been proposed to solve it, such as heuristics, genetic algorithms (GA), and, more recently, particle swarm optimization (PSO). This article aims to use PSO to solve grid scheduling problems, and compare it with other techniques. It is shown that many often-overlooked implementation details can have a huge impact on the performance of the method. In addition, experiments also show that the PSO has a tendency to stagnate around local minima in high-dimensional input problems. Therefore, this work also proposes a novel hybrid PSO-GA method that aims to increase swarm diversity when a stagnation condition is detected. The method is evaluated and compared with other PSO formulations; the results show that the new method can successfully improve the scheduling solution.
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Wilson Higashino et al.Addressing User Requirements in Open Source Software: The Role of Online Forumshttp://ir.lib.uwo.ca/electricalpub/47
http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/electricalpub/47Fri, 02 May 2014 10:20:45 PDT
User satisfaction has always been important in the success of software, regardless of whether it is closed and proprietary or open source software (OSS). OSS users are geographically distributed and include technical as well as novice users. However, it is generally believed that if OSS was more usable, its popularity would increase tremendously. Hence, users and their requirements need to be addressed in the priorities of an OSS environment. Online public forums are a major medium of communication for the OSS community. The research model of this work studies the relationship between user requirements in open source software and online public forums. To conduct this research, we used a dataset consisting of 100 open source software projects in different categories. The results show that online forums play a significant role in identifying user requirements and addressing their requests in open source software.
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Arif Raza et al.Query Analyzer and Manager for Complex Event Processing as a Servicehttp://ir.lib.uwo.ca/electricalpub/46
http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/electricalpub/46Fri, 02 May 2014 09:40:58 PDTComplex Event Processing (CEP) is a set of tools and techniques that can be used to obtain insights from high-volume, high-velocity continuous streams of events. CEP-based systems have been adopted in many situations that require prompt establishment of system diagnostics and execution of reaction plans, such as in monitoring of complex systems. This article describes the Query Analyzer and Manager (QAM) module, a first effort toward the development of a CEP as a Service (CEPaaS) system. This module is responsible for analyzing user-defined CEP queries and for managing their execution in distributed cloud-based environments. Using a language-agnostic internal query representation, QAM has a modular design that enables its adoption by virtually any CEP system.
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Wilson Higashino et al.Network and Energy-Aware Resource Selection Model for Opportunistic Gridshttp://ir.lib.uwo.ca/electricalpub/45
http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/electricalpub/45Fri, 02 May 2014 09:40:55 PDT
Due to increasing hardware capacity, computing grids have been handling and processing more data. This has led to higher amount of energy being consumed by grids; hence the necessity for strategies to reduce their energy consumption. Scheduling is a process carried out to define in which node tasks will be executed in the grid. This process can significantly impact the global system performance, including energy consumption. This paper focuses on a scheduling model for opportunistic grids that considers network traffic, distance between input files and execution node as well as the execution node status. The model was tested in a simulated environment created using GreenCloud. The simulation results of this model compared to a usual approach show a total power consumption savings of 7.10%.
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Izaias Faria et al.Challenges for MapReduce in Big Datahttp://ir.lib.uwo.ca/electricalpub/44
http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/electricalpub/44Thu, 01 May 2014 12:27:09 PDT
In the Big Data community, MapReduce has been seen as one of the key enabling approaches for meeting continuously increasing demands on computing resources imposed by massive data sets. The reason for this is the high scalability of the MapReduce paradigm which allows for massively parallel and distributed execution over a large number of computing nodes. This paper identifies MapReduce issues and challenges in handling Big Data with the objective of providing an overview of the field, facilitating better planning and management of Big Data projects, and identifying opportunities for future research in this field. The identified challenges are grouped into four main categories corresponding to Big Data tasks types: data storage (relational databases and NoSQL stores), Big Data analytics (machine learning and interactive analytics), online processing, and security and privacy. Moreover, current efforts aimed at improving and extending MapReduce to address identified challenges are presented. Consequently, by identifying issues and challenges MapReduce faces when handling Big Data, this study encourages future Big Data research.
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Katarina Grolinger et al.Semantic Privacy Policies for Service Description and Discovery in Service-Oriented Architecturehttp://ir.lib.uwo.ca/electricalpub/43
http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/electricalpub/43Mon, 07 Apr 2014 09:31:04 PDTPrivacy preservation in Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an open problem. This paper focuses on the areas of service description and discovery. The problems in these areas are that currently it is not possible to describe how a service provider deals with information received from a service consumer as well as discover a service that satisfies the privacy preferences of a consumer. There is currently no framework which offers a solution that supports a rich description of privacy policies and their integration in the process of service discovery. Thus, the main goal of this paper is to propose a privacy preservation framework for the areas of service description and discovery in SOA. The framework enhances service description and discovery with the specification and intersection of privacy policies using a base and domain-specific privacy ontologies. Moreover, the framework extends SOA to include roles responsible for implementing a privacy registry as well as mediating the interactions between service consumers and providers and the privacy preservation component.
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Diego Z. Garcia et al.Do Open Source Software Developers Listen to Their Users?http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/electricalpub/42
http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/electricalpub/42Mon, 24 Feb 2014 09:50:48 PST
In application software, the satisfaction of target users makes the software more acceptable. Open source software (OSS) systems have neither the physical nor the commercial boundaries of proprietary software, thus users from all over the world can interact with them. This free access is advantageous, as increasing numbers of users are able to access OSS; there are more chances of improvement. This study examines the way users’ feedback is handled by OSS developers. In our survey, we have also inquired whether OSS developers consult professional usability experts to improve their projects. According to the results, majority of OSS developers neither consider usability as their top priority nor do they consult usability experts.
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Arif Raza et al.Analyzing the Non-Functional Requirements in the Desharnais Dataset for Software Effort Estimationhttp://ir.lib.uwo.ca/electricalpub/41
http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/electricalpub/41Thu, 20 Feb 2014 04:36:00 PST
Studying the quality requirements (aka Non-Functional Requirements (NFR)) of a system is crucial in Requirements Engineering. Many software projects fail because of neglecting or failing to incorporate the NFR during the software life development cycle. This paper focuses on analyzing the importance of the quality requirements attributes in software effort estimation models based on the Desharnais dataset. The Desharnais dataset is a collection of eighty one software projects of twelve attributes developed by a Canadian software house. The analysis includes studying the influence of each of the quality requirements attributes, as well as the influence of all quality requirements attributes combined when calculating software effort using regression and Artificial Neural Network (ANN) models. The evaluation criteria used in this investigation include the Mean of the Magnitude of Relative Error (MMRE), the Prediction Level (PRED), Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE), Mean Error and the Coefficient of determination (R2). Results show that the quality attribute “Language” is the most statistically significant when calculating software effort. Moreover, if all quality requirements attributes are eliminated in the training stage and software effort is predicted based on software size only, the value of the error (MMRE) is doubled.
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Ali Bou Nassif et al.Soft Skills and Software Development: A Reflection from the Software Industryhttp://ir.lib.uwo.ca/electricalpub/40
http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/electricalpub/40Tue, 04 Feb 2014 10:41:12 PST
Psychological theories assert that not everybody is fit for every task, as people have different personality traits and abilities. Often, personality traits are expressed in people’s soft skills. That is, the way people perceive, plan and execute any assigned task is influenced by their set of soft skills. Most of the studies carried out on the human factor in IS concentrate primarily on personality types. Soft skills have been given comparatively little attention by researchers. We review the literature relating to soft skills and the software engineering and information systems domain before describing a study based on 650 job advertisements posted on well-known recruitment sites from a range of geographical locations including, North America, Europe, Asia and Australia. The study makes use of nine defined soft skills to assess the level of demand for each of these skills related to individual job roles within the software industry. This work reports some of the vital statistics from industry about the requirements of soft skills in various roles of software development phases. The work also highlights the variation in the types of skills required for each of the roles. We found that currently although the software industry is paying attention to soft skills up to some extent while hiring but there is a need to further acknowledge the role of these skills in software development. The objective of this paper is to analyze the software industry’s soft skills requirements for various software development positions, such as system analyst, designer, programmer, and tester. We pose two research questions, namely, (1) What soft skills are appropriate to different software development lifecycle roles, and (2) Up to what extend does the software industry consider soft skills when hiring an employee. The study suggests that there is a further need of acknowledgment of the significance of soft skills from employers in software industry.
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Faheem Ahmed et al.Furthering the Growth of Cloud Computing by Providing Privacy as a Servicehttp://ir.lib.uwo.ca/electricalpub/39
http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/electricalpub/39Fri, 24 Jan 2014 13:36:03 PST
The evolution of Cloud Computing as a viable business solution for providing hardware and software has created many security concerns. Among these security concerns, privacy is often overlooked. If Cloud Computing is to continue its growth, this privacy concern will need to be addressed. In this work we discuss the current growth of Cloud Computing and the impact the public sector and privacy can have in furthering this growth. To begin to provide privacy protection for Cloud Computing, we introduce privacy constraints that outline privacy preferences. We propose the expansion of Cloud Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to include these privacy constraints as Quality of Service (QoS) levels. This privacy QoS must be agreed upon along with the rest of the QoS terms within the SLA by the Cloud consumer and provider. Finally, we introduce Privacy as a Service (PraaS) to monitor the agreement and provide enforcement if necessary.
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David S. Allison et al.Shared-data or message passing computing models – A human factor in technical choiceshttp://ir.lib.uwo.ca/electricalpub/38
http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/electricalpub/38Tue, 21 Jan 2014 08:55:49 PSTAngela Sodan et al.